This is a book about representations of sodomy. While most of the texts it considers are literary - works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser and others - it is framed by more recent political considerations. The book takes as axiomatic that Foucault’s description of sodomy as ‘that utterly confused category’ which he assigned to historic regimes before the advent of sexuality, applies not only to Renaissance texts but to modern situations as well. The analyses of literary texts engage the most advanced work in contemporary literary criticism (that done by feminist and New Historicist critics) and propose a gay studies perspective that necessarily complicates and enriches the discussions of gender and history. Goldberg brings rigorous scholarship to bear on a powerful contemporary polemic about the ways in which a past that never was is used to justify the repression of gay sexuality today.